Backing Up Your iTunes 7 Media Library

Depending on the size of your iTunes media library, you can invest a lot of time ripping your CDs to your Mac. If something goes wrong, like your hard drive crashes, all of that hard work, along with any songs, videos and movies you purchased from the iTunes Store could be lost. If you have a good backup strategy in place, you shouldnit have to worry. But for just in case, Apple added a media library backup option to iTunes 7.

Hereis how it works:

Launch iTunes 7. Itis probably in your Dock, but you can always find it in your Applications folder.

Choose File > Back Up to Disc.

iTunes 7 new library backup option.

Choose what you want to back up from the iTunes Backup dialog. You can choose to back up your entire iTunes library, just your iTunes Store purchases, or only additions or changes since your last backup.

iTunes 7 lets you choose what to back up.

Click the Back Up button.

Place a blank CD or DVD into your Mac. If your library is too big to fit on one disc, iTunes will prompt you for additional discs until it completes the backup.

To restore your iTunes library backup, launch iTunes 7 and place the first disc from your backup into your Mac. iTunes will walk you through restoring your media files.

There are a couple of limitations to iTunes 7is built-in backup feature: First, any purchases you have made from Audible.com through iTunes are not backed up. Second, the backup discs you burn are not playable since they are data archive discs.

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